Drone Hunting for Loch Ness Monster Has Weird False Alarm

(Newser)
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Well that must have been weird: A marine robot scouring Loch Ness in Scotland detected something at the bottom of the lake, something that looked exactly the Loch Ness Monster. And it was indeed Nessie. Except, as Reuters reports, it was a long-lost 30-foot replica built for a 1970 Sherlock Holmes movie that sank during filming. "We have found a monster, but not the one many people might have expected," Nessie expert Adrian Shine tells the BBC. There's still hope for believers, though: The underwater robot from Norwegian company Kongsberg Maritime isn't finished mapping the lake, a project called Operation Groundtruth that will result in the first high-resolution survey of the body of water, reports Discovery. It should wrap up next week.

In addition to finding the movie prop, the drone named Munin has turned up a shipwreck and has debunked a claim that the lake has a mysterious trench in which a monster might hide, reports the Herald. As for the prop, it was used in the Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, directed by Billy Wilder. By most accounts, Wilder didn't like the look of the prop's two humps and ordered them removed before a shot—not realizing they were the main things keeping the "monster" afloat. A tourism official at VisitScotland tells Newsweek that the mapping project won't hurt the legend—and the related $60 million industry—even if no evidence turns up. "People like the idea that there is possibly something lurking there." (One longtime hunter thinks Nessie is a catfish.)